Problem
statement: This article leverages an Azure industry cloud example
to onboard a FinTech Service to the Azure public cloud. While there are many
examples from the Azure industry clouds and verticals, this article is
specifically for onboarding a financial calculator service that acts a broker
between external producers and consumers. With this case study, we attempt to
do a dry run of the principles learned from the Azure Cloud adoption framework
and make the migration in the most efficient, reliable, available and cost-effective
manner.
Article: Onboarding a service such as a financial calculator in
the Azure public cloud is all about improving its deployment, using the proper
subscription, planning for capacity and demand, optimizing the Azure resources,
monitoring the service health, setting up management group, access control,
security and privacy of the services and setting up the pricing controls and
the support options. We look at these in more detail now.
Proper
subscription: Many of the rate limits, quotas and the availability of
services are quite sufficient in the very first tier of subscription. The Azure
management console has a specific set of options to determine the scale
required for the service.
Resource and
Resource groups: The allocation of a resource group,
identity and access control is certainly a requirement for the onboarding of a
service. It is equally important to use the pricing calculator and TCO
calculator in the Azure public cloud to determine the costs. Some back of the
envelope calculation in terms of the bytes per request, number of requests per
second, the latency, recovery time, recovery point, MTTR, MTBF help with
determining the requirements and the resource management.
Optimizing the
Azure resources: This is automated. If we are deploying
a python Django application and a node.js frontend application, then it is
important to make use of api gateway, load balancer, proxy and scalability
options, certificates, domain name resources etc. The use of resources specific
to the service as well as those that enhance its abilities must be methodically
ruled off from the checklist that one can draw from the Azure management
portal.
Monitoring the
service health: Metrics specific to the financial calculator service in
terms of the size of the data processed, the mode of delivery, the number of
requests submitted to the system, the load on the service in terms of the
distribution statistics and other such metrics will help determine if the
service requires additional resources or when something goes wrong. Alerts can
be set up for the thresholds so we can remain passive until we get an alert.
Management
group, Identity and access control: Even if there
is only one person in charge of the service, the setting up of a management
group, user and access control formalizes and detaches that person so that
anyone else can take on the administrator role.
This option will also help set up registrations and notifications to
that account so that it is easier to pass the responsibility around.
Security and privacy: The financial calculator service happens to be a
stateless transparent financial proxy which does not retain any data from the
customer, so it does not need any further actions towards security and privacy.
TLS setup on the service and use of proper certificates along with domain names
will help keep it compute resource independent.
Advisor: Azure has an advisor
capability that advises on the efficiencies possible with the deployment after
the above-mentioned steps have been taken. This helps in streamlining the
operations and reducing cost.
Conclusion: The service onboarding feature is critical towards the
proper functioning of the service both in terms of its cost and benefits. When
the public cloud knowledge center articles are followed up meticulously for the
use of the Azure management portal in the deployment of the service, the
service is guaranteed to improve its return on investment.
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